Economist Writing Every Day

I wrote at the end of the summer about some changes that I would make to my Game Theory course. You can go back and read the post. Here, I’m going to evaluate the effectiveness of the changes.

First, some history.

I’ve taught GT a total of 5 time. Below are my average student course evaluations for “I would recommend this class to others” and “I would consider this instructor excellent”. Although the general trend has been improvement, improving ratings and the course along the way, some more context would be helpful. In 2019, my expectations for math were too high. Shame on me. It was also my first time teaching GT, so I had a shaky start. In 2020, I smoothed out a lot of the wrinkles, but I hadn’t yet made it a great class. 

In 2021, I had a stellar crop of students. There was not a single student who failed to learn. The class dynamic was perfect and I administered the course even more smoothly. They were comfortable with one another, and we applied the ideas openly. In 2022, things went south. There were too many students enrolled in the section, too many students who weren’t prepared for the course, and too many students who skated by without learning the content. Finally, in 2023, the year of my changes, I had a small class with a nice symmetrical set of student abilities.  

Historically, I would often advertise this class, but after the disappointing 2022 performance, and given that I knew that I would be making changes, I didn’t advertise for the 2023 section. That part worked out perfectly. Clearly, there is a lot of random stuff that happens that I can’t control. But, my job is to get students to learn, help the capable students to excel, and to not make students *too* miserable in the process – no matter who is sitting in front of me.

1) Minimal Understanding Quizzes: These were by far the most time intensive change that I made. Even though they were all formula questions and not multiple choice, some of the questions were still somewhat gameable such that students could pass them without understanding what they were doing. But, that was a minority. I’ll refine some questions, but this was a success overall. Only a couple of students struggled to the point of submitting subsequent assignments late. Part of that was genuine struggle, part of it was refusing to seek help. In the future, I will also be more intentional about providing some time for students to complete an attempt in class. These were successful overall and I’ll use them again.

2) Rearranging: This was a matter of re-organizing the notes. I introduced both normal and extensive form games in the same module and instead separated topics by simultaneity and sequentiality.  That was a good idea and made extensive-form games less jarring when we needed to talk about subgames and subgame-perfect Nash equilibria. It succeeded perfectly and I’ll do it again.

3) More Time per Topic: This was an improvement, but can be improved more still. 3 class days for each topic was good on average, but not for each topic. Specifically, I have a module on unobserved payoffs in which students rationalize the observed equilibria by adjusting the payoffs. That could have been done in 2 or even 1 class day instead of having a slow week. Similarly, I would add an additional day for continuous strategies wherein we spend a preliminary day on the power rule, substitution, algebra, and fractions (oh my!). But, I’m a perfectionist. As it is, midterm scores were the highest they had ever been in any section ever. That’s saying a lot.

Relatedly, more time per module pushed back some of the heavy lifting on the term paper (TP) deadlines. Which caused more of a crunch toward the end of the semester that needn’t have happened. Spending more time on new content in class meant that students spent less time applying the material in their paper. My TP deadlines could have been sooner without being too burdensome. Even though student understanding this semester was higher overall, the distribution was also tighter with no superstars on the TP. That’s partially my fault.

4) Better Literature Reviews: It’s really hard to get students to read academic papers, and then write a literature review that mimics the format and tone. Some of the structure of literature reviews is domain specific. And students keep wanting to narrate their writing process and switch to future tense, implicitly pushing some of their thinking to the future. They were better this year, but I’m going to provide more guidance and examples next year. It’s really hard to solicit good writing while also not providing a boring formula. Result: Partial success.

5) Term Paper Concision: The idea was to limit how much students leaned inappropriately on AI (chatgpt). This was very successful. Some students used AI and wrote great sections of papers. Others bloviated and repeated that the issues were “complicated”, “multifaceted”, and “had a variety of factors”. By grading concision, the lazy students got penalized. AI served pretty well when describing the context of games and their theory. But AI absolutely mis-served students when it came time to interpret the results. Categorically, students who used AI fell face first against the cold hard floor of their understanding when they needed to summarize or discuss their findings. I have no complaints about students using AI. I gave them overt low-stakes chances to see how it helped/hurt. They won’t get that elsewhere. It’s a keeper.